Nektarios (Aris Servetalis) was a Greek priest from Alexandria, Egypt in the 1900s. Now, more than a century after his death, he is worshiped by Greek nationals on the inside and outside of those boundaries. He is not well known outside of that community, however. To raise awareness about him, a Greek Christian studio approved a biographical drama about him. They named this movie Man of God and attached Yelena Popovic to direct, produce, and write it. Popova’s other directing work includes a story of a Greek immigrant to Los Angeles who dreams of becoming a rockstar. Apart from the cynical motives of producing a Christian movie, it makes sense why Popovic would empathize with this outsider. This has many angles one being that it differs from the rest of the examples of evangelical cinema of the past twenty years.
The most self-evident angle is whether or not Nektarios and the people around him are human enough to make this film good. And for such a poorly made film, ‘Man of God’ structurally organizes itself into four acts instead of the typical three. And the structure and lengths of these acts are, for lack of a better descriptor, unconventional when juxtaposed with the low bar of expectations that I set with this film. The first of the three short acts is Nektarios leaving the intrigue in Egypt. Which by credit goes to this movie for showing the Blackest depiction of Egypt in my cinematic memory. The second sees him getting an assignment on an island with Greek male citizens who despise priests. The third is when he manages a school, where he works under a hot president Christos.
This part of the movie explains that Christos is only giving Nektarios a hard time because he is a sad atheist. The fourth act, which is the longest, is when Nektarios manages a convent. From time to time, Nektarios’ dubious status as a Greek citizen rears its head. But that’s one of Man of God’s possible windows into Greece as a young country and the center of one of the oldest sects of Christianity. It also serves as a possible way of depicting Nektarios’ pathos, which in fairness, it shows sometimes. But those moments are simply too scarce. The movie instead chooses to show him as ultra-pious in an unconvincing manner. At least the movie attempts to answer why he is the most unsuitable person to manage a convent and, if that was not shocking enough, even more shocking is that perception of him now and then. My eyebrows raise because it uses the darkest cinematography in depicting these Mediterranean, not to say paradisiacal regions.
With regards to eyebrows, they belong to and are therefore good for cops which is nice for this ACAB Christian movie. Still, I have to admit a lot is missing within this film. As I mentioned previously, these people’s heads are full of junk. It does not come from nowhere it comes from the acting. It comes from the dialogue. It is the dialogues that carry the bigger blame because in each nation, there is at the minimum one actor who can say things that are associated with saints and actually perform them. I looked up this information and apparently, half of Greeks speak English. Nonetheless, Servetalis and his costars like Alexander Petrov have a difficult time putting some intelligent thoughts into very shallow dialogues in a foreign language, and it shows. In the end, Mickey Rourke wastes two minutes of his life in a meaningless nonpartisan scene.
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